Swedish spooks knocked offline by hack attack
PrintDDoS attack follows intro of new monitoring powers
Posted in Crime, 5th November 2009 15:24 GMT
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The website of the Swedish Signals Intelligence agency (Försvarets Radioanstalt, or FRA) was taken offline by a massive DDoS attack this week.
Fra.se was intermittently inaccessible from Monday night until Thursday morning, when full service was restored. The agency was in the news recently after Swedish legislators passed a law allowing FRA to tap internet communications networks that pass through Sweden.
The monitoring effectively started last month, reports Finnish security firm F-secure, which notes that Russia's international internet traffic passes through Sweden.
It's unclear who's behind the attacks, but Russian cybercrime operations or possibly file sharers lashing out against the Pirate Bay clampdown are among the possible suspects.
In a statement, (translation via Google here) FRA said that the temporary disruption to its web site had no effect on its work.
Downtime stats for the Fra.se site can be found, via Pingdom, here.
An apparently separate denial-of-service attack downed about 40 websites belonging to police and media outlets in Sweden last week. ®
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